Dungeon Crawler Carl

With the benefit of hindsight, I should have read the dedication in Dungeon Crawler Carl as 'HERE THERE BE MONSTERS'. What it actually says is the following:

This version of Dungeon Crawler Carl is dedicated to the star of one of the greatest, most inspiring, most amazing survival stories of our time.

Fiona.

Fiona the hippo. 

Yes, I am dedicating this book to a goddamned hippopotamus. 

Sorry, Mom.

It really has everything. A zaniness hovering between being insecure and smug. Graceless repetition because the prose wasn't structured properly in the first instance. A self-conscious swearword to indicate that what's happening is funny. A gesture toward emotion as an afterthought. My god, if it isn't a perfect distillation of the whole book. 

I picked up Dungeon Crawler Carl on a recommendation from multiple people I trust, and now will never trust again. It's the first entry in a LitRPG series that is both self-published online (visionary auteur Matt Dinniman has kept the digital rights, an incredibly baller move) and now trad-published in book stores. 

Dungeon Crawler Carl has an air of originality because, while LitRPGs have been popular in countries like Japan, Korea and Russia for a while, this time it's about a cool white American dude. Our titular Carl is 6'3", jacked, and weirdly defensive about having been a member of the Coast Guard. Without warning every building on Earth and anyone inside them is destroyed - "splattered into dust" at "approximately 2.23 am", as we are told on literally page one, and if you think that's another sign of bad things to come, you're correct. 

"The times when Dinniman writes something dense with subtext, it's because he's done so accidentally"

Objectively incorrect use of words and their meanings aside, the set up is fine, I guess. The middle of the planet is transformed into a multi-layered videogame-esque dungeon by the genocidal aliens now in charge. Carl, along with a prize showcat called Princess Donut belonging to Carl's ex-girlfriend, and several million other members of humanity, take their chances in the dungeon. Their exploits as Crawlers are televised across the galaxy in a daily reality TV show.

The LitRPG genre leaves in the tedious grinding and stat fiddling that you do in a videogame, but sort of excise from your memories of playing it. In Dungeon Crawler Carl, your brain has to suffer through multiple paragraphs like: 

"She also received a dozen Heal scrolls from a Silver Survivor's Box. That one was rewarded to her because she'd ended a boss battle with less than 5% of her health. The scrolls were good to have because there was no countdown between reading each one, and even better yet, we could use the scrolls on each other."

I didn't have a specific quote in mind then, I just opened the book at random. There's even a supporting character who's the head of the Tutorial Guild and may as well be called Basil Exposition. Info dumps like this happen once a page or so, sometimes in the middle of the universally boring fights, and are all delivered in this repetitive, basic style with very few sentences of varying length. It's leaden. 

More than that, it's dead. Nothing comes alive, adjectives are rare and a vanishing few of them are sensory. The dungeon is "dark" and "big". Goblins turn up a lot in this book, and the first Carl meets look "much like they did in movies and video games." Masterful stuff. I will give Dinniman an amount of credit for coming up with a reason why the dungeon is full of references to Earth pop-culture. And at least he shows more restraint than Ernest Cline.